I Believe: Our Risen Saviour (1 Corinthians 15:1-26)

Hello, listeners.

This is Pastor Creighton.

Thank you for tuning in to Newsong's Sermon Podcast.

At Newsong Church, we want to see Jesus lifted high in Port Perry, Ontario, as we worship, grow, and serve.

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Today we continue with our sermon series, I believe, the Apostles' Creed in the Christian Life, with our risen Savior.

Let's listen in.

I believe in Jesus Christ.

On the third day he rose again.

Let's pray.

Gracious Lord Jesus, would you kindle within us this resurrection hope anew by your Holy Spirit?

And may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be always pleasing in your sight, O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer.

Amen.

Please be seated.

And happy Easter.

We had our Christmas readings a few weeks ago, been walking through the Apostles' Creed, asking what does this mean for the Christian life?

So it makes sense that the major neighborhoods of doctrine we find in the Apostles' Creeds are marked out by that sacred time that we find in the church calendar.

Christmas at Jesus' nativity and virgin birth, and Good Friday we had last week with our readings about the cross.

And now we come to Easter and the resurrection hope.

Well, when I was a uh a student at Moody Theological Seminary in Chicago, I was uh well, I was doing a couple things.

I was hitting the books and uh parting as hard as Bible school allows, and uh and getting to know Anglicans, because I didn't I didn't grow up Anglican, many of you know that.

And uh and I was discovering this Anglican thing in college, feeling called into this way of being a Christian, so I was getting to know Anglicans, trying to get to know what they're about.

And one Anglican I was getting to know uh was a really wonderful priest, lived out of state, was quickly becoming a real mentor to a very close buddy of mine, and they were coming in through town and they were looking for a place to stay.

So I had a little humble graduate student apartment, so, and a couple of air mattresses, so I thought this'll work.

And so we went, we hung out, and and I just wanted to ask questions.

I knew that this this Anglican priest had had a career, spent the first half of his career in another major Protestant uh denomination.

Uh, nothing to do with Anglicanism, but uh but a different denomination.

So I was curious to hear, someone having a bit of a conversion myself, I was curious to hear his story.

What is it that drew you to Anglicanism?

Why'd you end up here?

Is it prayer book, tradition, practice?

What's going on?

So we get talking and well, I get asking along these lines.

And he he shared this.

He said, Well, I knew that I was being called out of my former denomination after a particular committee meeting.

And I said to him, That must have been some kind of committee meeting.

And he kind of smirked.

But he said, the truth is it wasn't so much the committee meeting.

He said, probably it could have been an email.

But he said that that really was a comment that happened after this particular committee meeting that that for him really sealed the deal.

He says this this committee was himself, probably a dozen other kind of local pastors in this denomination, you know, pastors of influence, and and whatever it was that they were meeting about, the agenda was was pretty banal.

But um, but they conclude their meeting, they motion for adjournment, and and this this is happening during Holy Week.

Who schedules a committee meeting, church committee during Holy Week?

I don't know, but you know, but this is happening, and it's early in Holy Week, and so you know, one pastor kind of elbows the other and and says, Um, as pastors do, how's the Easter sermon coming?

You know, because that's a big deal for pastors, that Easter sermon.

And this pastor, um, my Anglican priest friend uh very vividly recalls, uh, rolled his eyes at the question and said, another year preaching this resurrection baloney.

Except he didn't say baloney.

So that's a remarkable thing.

But what happened next, I think shocked my friend even more.

He says that the response from this pastor who had asked this question went something like, Oh, I know.

I'm so done with this.

And then the question kind of gets posed around this table.

I mean, there's a dozen pastors at this table, and one by one it comes out that none of these pastors, except for my now Anglican friend, actually, unreservedly subscribe to the bodily resurrection of Jesus on Easter morning.

These are pastors, these are shepherds of the flock, none of whom take this claim that on the third day Jesus actually rose from the dead seriously.

So for my now Anglican priest friend, he said, that's when I knew.

That's when I knew I was being called out of this denomination and into another.

And it wasn't so much, well, I mean, there was sure some maybe some features, but Anglicanism he felt connected to, but for him, this was less of an allegiance to a particular denomination, and it was more of an allegiance to the gospel.

For my friend, he understood that gospel proclamation is resurrection proclamation.

There is no gospel without the resurrection of Jesus.

And without the resurrection of Jesus, there is good, there is no good news.

Because death has defeated life, and there is no hope beyond this life.

And as Paul writes, we are a people most to be pitied.

Christianity at its core, at its center, is good news about Jesus' defeat of death and sin.

This is what 1 Corinthians 15 is all about, our New Testament reading.

Gospel proclamation is resurrection proclamation.

1 Corinthians is written probably in the 50s AD, maybe 15 years or so after Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.

And in one of the larger sections of this letter, in one of the largest letters that Paul has written, it's dedicated all to this doctrine of the resurrection and the hope that Christians have because of it.

And this section, this large section on the resurrection, begins with a reminder of the gospel.

Let's look at verses one and two together.

I would remind you, brothers and sisters, Paul writes, of the gospel I preach to you, which you received in which you stand.

This gospel is your status as Christians, and by which you are being saved if you hold fast to the word I preach to you, unless you believed in vain.

See, introducing a whole section on the resurrection, Paul says, I want to remind you of the gospel, because the gospel and the resurrection are like this.

They go together, they are inseparable.

The resurrection is not peripheral to the gospel.

The resurrection is part and parcel to the gospel.

The resurrection is the good news that life has overcome death in Jesus Christ.

So, in the midst of this fledgling church community in Corinth, there's a few misguided, misleading, self-appointed teachers going around saying, you know, we really ought not to take this resurrection talk too seriously.

That kind of stuff doesn't happen.

Paul wants to make it crystal clear, those who've received the gospel in Corinth in the first century, at New Song in 2021, gospel proclamation is resurrection proclamation.

To this hope we are called to hold fast.

The language is to bind it, to restrain it to ourselves.

As though we're tying it on so tight when the winds and storms of life come a blowin'.

That's going nowhere from us.

We're carrying it with us wherever we go.

Gospel proclamation is resurrection proclamation.

This is the central fact of our Christian faith.

There is no victory in the cross without Christ's resurrection.

And we witness to this hope each and every time we recite the creed together.

There's three things I think Paul wants us to see about our resurrection hope.

Three things I want to point out to us this morning.

The resurrection is trustworthy.

The resurrection is indispensable to the gospel, and the resurrection is finally our hope.

It's trustworthy, it's indispensable, and it's our hope.

Let's take things from the top and look at 1 Corinthians verse 3.

If you have your Bibles or your readings, I encourage you to follow along.

See, let's be, I'm going to begin by reading here.

Paul says, I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.

I'm transmitting what was given to me.

This isn't something Paul's made up.

He wants a Christian community to receive this proclamation as a gift.

That Christ died for your sins, he says, in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

It's this phrase in accordance with the scriptures that appears twice in these two verses.

It ends up in our own Nicene Creed.

And Paul wants to make it crystal clear that there's good reason to trust in the resurrection.

There's good reason to hold fast to this doctrine.

Because for those like the church in Corinth that take biblical authority seriously, if we want to take the Bible seriously, we need to take its doctrine of the resurrection seriously.

Perhaps in the canopy of Paul's thought, we have Daniel chapter 12, our Old Testament reading this morning that promises that there will indeed be a life to come, a resurrection from the dead.

Daniel 12 · chapter mention

Perhaps more specifically, Paul is thinking of our Old Testament reading last week, Isaiah 52 and 53, where a suffering servant took on the sins and iniquities of God's people and put them to death, and yet miraculously rose from the dead and dealt out the spoils of new life as though he were a conqueror.

Paul understands something miraculous is happening.

And Paul understands that if you want to take the authority of Scripture seriously, you'll need to take seriously its claim that Christ raised from the dead.

But it's important for us to know that the first century was not full of uncritical, unthinking, unquestioning, you know, less than skeptical people as though, you know, rational thought was something that magically appeared in the last couple of hundred years.

No, Paul gets it.

His audience is skeptical.

And often we can be skeptical of this idea of the resurrection.

In fact, the very disciples whom Jesus promised, hey, I'm going to raise rise from the dead on the third day, when the women proclaimed the empty tomb to the disciples, they thought it was an idol tale, we're told in Luke 24.

See, these first century folks are no more superstitious nor less skeptical than we are.

They know that generally speaking, dead people don't come back to life.

That's not a thing that happens.

So Paul points to Scripture as a witness.

Paul points to eyewitnesses.

Paul points to those who have actually beheld the risen Lord Jesus in the flesh.

Verses four and five here.

The risen Christ, he says, appeared to Cephas, that is to Peter, that's Peter's Greek name.

And then to the twelve, the twelve disciples, including Matthias, who replaced Judas.

He appeared to the twelve.

The risen Christ appeared, he says, to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James, the Lord's own brother, and then to all the apostles, all those commissioned and sent to do ministry in his name.

See, Paul knows that this is a huge claim to make, but he says it's backed up by not a couple of eyewitnesses who have beheld the risen Lord Jesus.

This is not a myth.

This is not a fairy tale that Jesus rose from the dead.

This is not idle speculation.

This is not, boy, I wish we could have an alternate ending here.

Paul is saying, go and talk to these people, and each and every one will say, I saw the risen Lord Jesus.

Christ actually rose from the dead.

This is not a tale the disciples made up for themselves as though he's never really dead if we just remember him in our hearts.

No, Jesus rose in flesh and blood, and he was beheld by almost 500 people at one time.

Hallucinations don't work that way, by the way.

But if nothing else, we've got Paul's own witness.

Paul says, last of all, as one untimely born, the risen Christ appeared also to me.

He says, I'm the least of the apostles because I persecuted the Church of God.

See, Paul didn't always subscribe to the resurrection hope.

There was a time Paul wanted to put Christians to death, those who proclaimed the resurrection, and I think Paul would have said he was very good at that.

He was sanctioned to put them to death.

He was very good at it.

But Paul had a powerful, life-transforming encounter with the risen Lord Jesus that left him forever changed.

And now the great persecutor of the church becomes the great proclaimer of the resurrection.

So in verse 11, Paul says, So we preach, so you believe.

We believe with good reason.

All sources point to yes, Jesus actually rose from the dead.

And even if we at Nusong don't have 500 living witnesses to go and ask and swap stories with, we do have the voice of the apostles in Scripture today.

They all proclaim that Christ rose from the dead.

Here's how one professor, historian, writes, he says this, and I love this image.

If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, that is, early Christians, of a phenomenon undeniably attested in the New Testament, rips a hole in history.

It's a hole the size and shape of the resurrection.

And what does the secular historian propose to stop with it?

The idea is something remarkable here has happened.

A hole has been torn in history in the size and shape of the resurrection.

What alternate explanation could there be for the existence of our faith, aside from the fact that Christ rose from the dead?

We hold fast to this hope with good reason.

Christ is risen.

It is a trustworthy hope.

If it's a trustworthy hope, Paul wants to deal with the problem head-on.

In verse 12, he writes this If Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, he says, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.

See the issue here in Corinth is a little bit different than around the board table at my friend's former denomination here.

These Corinthian false teachers seem to be saying, not so much that Christ didn't rise from the dead, they're saying that Christians don't rise from the dead.

Maybe Jesus came back to life from death, but that's not something that happens for Christians.

Paul wants to make it clear there is an essential unity between Christ and his people.

If Christ completely took on our humanity at his virgin birth and his incarnation, then his humanity was put to death, yes, but his humanity, which is our common humanity, rose to new life.

So Paul seems to say it's a contradiction in terms to say that human beings don't rise from the dead to new life.

You'd be, you'd end up saying that Christ didn't rise to new life.

You catch the connection here?

There's an essential unity between Christ and his people.

To deny one that Christ's people rise from the dead is to deny ultimately that Christ would rise from the dead.

And I suspect there's a lot of Greek thinking here.

We share a similar kind of mindset, I think, because we we tend to think of ourselves in terms of a division between what's immaterial and what's material, the soul and the body, so to speak.

And you know, the soul is good because we think deep, ponderous thoughts about the universe and all the mysteries, and know no one else to.

Okay, maybe you guys do, and maybe me less so, but um, but you know, the soul ascends, right?

And the body is kind of gross and and kind of it gets runny noses and it gets kind of smelly, and we're all kind of sweaty here because it's really warm.

And the body is this lowly thing, but the soul, oh, that's that's the good thing.

And so so what is death?

Death is that final release.

The soul sheds the physical husk of this decaying body, and finally we're released to be our full potential.

For Paul that and for scripture, that's not the case.

God created us human beings, physical and a physical and spiritual hybrid is what C.S.

Lewis calls us.

And the body is a good thing.

And the body is God's desire for us, and ultimately our hope is not that we have an immaterial eternity just floating out there in existence, but rather that we have an embodied hope for eternal life.

See, for Paul's opponents here, the resurrection from the dead was something like a reincarceration for the soul.

Paul wants to say not so.

He wants to point to the essential union between Christ and the believer, which we read in Romans chapter six, the sign and seal of which is baptism.

Here's what Paul goes on to say in Romans 6.

If we have died with Christ, that is, we share an essential unity in baptism to his death, we believe that we will, future tense, also live with him, an embodied existence.

We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again.

Death no longer has dominion over him.

For the death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God.

So he says, You Christians, you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

There has been a spiritual renewal that has taken place in the heart of Christians.

The Spirit has called us into new life in Christ.

And that new spiritual life in Christ will translate into a realized physical resurrection on the last day.

Our regenerated spirits will be joined to an eternal, incorruptible body, and that will be a physical reality.

Paul wants to say to the Corinthians, if you deny this, your hope deflates really quickly.

Verses 14 to 18, he says, our preaching is in vain, faith is in vain and futile, we're misrepresenting God, you're still in your sins, and there's no hope for you beyond death if there's no resurrection from the dead.

Well, we might say, Paul, Christianity offers some great moral tales.

It tells us a good ethical life to live, gives us a couple of good one-liners, too.

Paul would say this: there is no amount of morality, no amount of ethical living that can give you hope to take beyond death.

You can live the best moral life you can and still be as dead as the rest of them.

There is no hope for us beyond death, unless there is one who has gone into death and come back for our sake.

And how could we call Jesus a great moral teacher when he himself says, I am the resurrection and the life?

That's a big promise.

And that's Christ's promise for his people.

If there is no resurrection, Paul says, there is no Christian faith.

One professor of mine said of this passage, if there's no resurrection, go home and eat chips, because there's no reason for you to be here.

Seriously.

Why are we doing this thing?

Because church makes us feel real good, because we like sitting in a sauna for an hour.

We come here because we are a resurrection people.

We are claimed by Christ's new life, that he is won for us in the empty tomb and through the cross.

We come as those who belong to him.

We come as those to get a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, to hear the word of promise that Christ has given to each and every one of us, and the word of promise that we can hold fast to, because this is the one who has gone to death and back for our sake.

If the resurrection is trustworthy, the resurrection is indispensable.

We cannot just let it go.

The gospel goes with it.

Maybe if these things are true, we can see it as our hope.

This is where I want us to land today.

The resurrection is our final hope.

Paul writes, verse 20.

In fact, this is trustworthy.

This is not speculative.

In fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

For as by a man came death, and by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead, for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

There's huge implications.

For the resurrection here.

Paul describes Christ's resurrection as the first fruits, which is an agricultural metaphor with kind of two points to it.

One, the first fruit is that first crop that kind of matures, and it suggests what the full harvest is going to be like.

A really vital, a really good firstfruit suggests this is going to be a really vital and full and fruitful harvest.

Well, what greater firstfruit could there be than for someone to have died and come back to life?

Paul says there is no greater.

Paul would say there is no greater firstfruit.

But there's a second sense of this agricultural metaphor.

Firstfruits is that offering given to God by God's people to glorify him, to recognize their ever-present need and dependence for him.

And we see that in Leviticus 23, firstfruits, the very first fruits of the harvest being offered to God in worship.

So Christ has become, by his very own will, our firstfruits.

He's become an offering on our behalf to God, going to death and coming to new life for our sake.

So that now Christ has been raised, and where once we were in Adam and we were subject to corruption and death and sin, now we are those who belong to Christ, and his new life becomes our new life by faith.

So there's an order to things.

Verse 23, first Christ and then those who belong to him.

Christ was raised first, we will be raised in the future, on the last day, when we enter into his eternal kingdom, where death is finally and completely defeated.

I think this is honest as we can get about death.

Sometimes we try and sugarcoat death, don't we?

Especially in those moments where we're trying to find words of comfort.

Scripture recognizes death is not a friend, nor is death friendly.

Death is the last enemy to be defeated, and it's the last enemy to be defeated by our risen Lord Jesus on our behalf, and it will be completely defeated on that last day when we who belong to Christ will be raised with Him and live with Him and enjoy Him forever.

The resurrection is our hope.

It's a hope of new life, a hope of victory over death.

So what a comfort to us, what a comfort to those of us who experience what it is to live with a failing body, to have failing health, to not know why your back hurts.

The resurrection tells us that though our outward selves decay, we will be raised to new life in Christ.

And this promise is so certain we can take it to the bank because Christ has gone before us as our first fruits.

See, friends, gospel proclamation is resurrection proclamation.

It is a trustworthy proclamation.

It is an indispensable proclamation.

It is a hopeful proclamation.

Because Christ has died and Christ is risen, we can be those who sing, Christ is risen from the dead.

We are one with him again.

Come awake, come awake, come and rise up from the grave.

Amen.